America is selling, at the present time, about L160,000,000 worth of food and other raw products in Europe.  These, together, represent her chief branch of business, in which nearly fifty per cent. of her population is engaged, and all this merchandise is sold in the free trade markets of the world.  Wages in America, therefore, cannot possibly be regulated by the tariff, because, whatever wages can be earned by men engaged in the production of agricultural products—­the prices of which are fixed in Liverpool—­must be the rate of wages which will substantially be paid in other branches of business.  Wages, like water, seek a level; if manufacture pays best, labor will quit agriculture; if agriculture pays best, manufactures will decline, and agriculture progress.

A glance at the condition of industrial society in America vividly illustrates this conclusion.  Any man, with a few dollars and a strong pair of arms, can win far greater rewards from the soil than he could possibly obtain by the same effort in Europe.  His wages are high, because the grade of comfort to be obtained from the land by means of a little labor is high, and the artisans’ wages must follow suit, if men are to be tempted from the field into the workshop.  American politicians, however, would have us believe that American labor owes its prosperity to taxation; in other words, that what the immigrant seeks is not the rich prizes offered him by a free and fertile soil, but the blessings which flow from a tariff that adds an average 40 per cent. to the cost of everything he needs except food.

One more illustration, and I have done.  Upon the wall hangs a diagram which shows the movements of American wages, of English wages, and of the tariff from 1860 to 1883.  I have already argued that a tariff cannot determine wages, and the diagram affords positive proof that it has not determined them in America, as between 1860 and the present time.  On the contrary, their movements are evidently due to the same causes as have influenced wages here during this period, while it is certainly remarkable that they have fallen sooner, fallen lower, and recovered less completely in America, where industry is “protected,” than in Great Britain, were it is “unprotected.”

Shortly to recapitulate all that has been advanced, I have endeavored to show: 

1st.  That a great change has occurred in the social condition of labor in the United States during the last forty years, and that, spite of all the existing agencies of improvement, it is doubtful whether the working classes of America are not, at the present moment, falling still further from those high ideals of operative life which once so brilliantly distinguished the United States from European countries.

2d.  That, although wages are probably some 60 per cent. higher in the chief manufacturing districts of America than in Great Britain, yet an English artisan would find himself little richer there than at home, after paying the enhanced prices for subsistence, and conforming to the higher standard of life which prevails in the States.  At the same time, his whole social position and opportunities of advancement would be immensely improved.